Category: Pensions Industry

As the financial services industry digests a wave of incoming regulation and adjusts to a new climate, Financial News asked leading executives whether regulators and policymakers were beginning to adopt a more realistic approach and whether the financial industry begun to accept a “new normal”. David Norgrove, Chairman of PensionsFirst and Long Acre Life, suggested …

This week both RSA, the leading global insurer, and Heineken, the international beer and cider company, announced their adoption of PensionsFirst’s award-winning risk management platform, PFaroe to manage their defined benefit pension risk exposures. With the addition of these two names, PFaroe is now being used by more than 30 pension plans representing over £80bn of …

Life expectancy has increased considerably over the past 50 years in the western world, driving up pension scheme liability valuations as more members are expected to live further and further into their 90s and beyond. And because the financial health of so many of the UK’s large public companies is intrinsically linked to their DB …

The ultimate goal of many pension scheme sponsors and trustees is a full buyout, which allows them to transfer all of their pension liabilities over to an insurer. But with unfavourable market conditions making buyouts relatively more expensive, the longevity swap market is attracting interest as a means of reducing risk as a step on …

Many believed that insurer Aviva’s decision early this year to withdraw from the pension £50m-plus bulk annuity market (which includes both buy-ins and buyouts), signalled the death knell for the market. However, contributing to a feature for Pensions Age magazine, PensionsFirst Capital CEO Hugo James disagrees, arguing that it innovation can overcome many of the …

The latest headline pension deficit figures, which suggest that the total defined benefit (DB) pension deficit of UK plc has more than doubled over the past year, provide yet more evidence that schemes are continuing to run extremely large, and unhedged, risks. Against this backdrop, de-risking DB pension schemes is now one of the most …

With the costs of providing a defined benefit pension scheme spiralling, managing pension risk has fast risen to the top of finance directors’ agendas. While innovative solutions provided by one of our clients, Long Acre Life, has finally made a pension buyout economically attractive for finance directors, many remain reticent about “locking-in” to a transaction when …